Mouthing Off

Is the Voice in My Mouth Bothering You?

Today’s accidental blog (your Miss O’ had really meant to take the weekend off and accomplish physical tasks, and then all this stuff started coming up and all these articles and videos and TED talks and Facebook posts, and all of Miss O’s spidey senses got engaged and goddammit if the only thing for it wasn't to sling some verbal webs! And she’s off!) is about the power of one. Rather than set up a thesis, let me jump to the story that was my brainchild’s catalyst:

Actress the theater director Christy McIntosh, a gorgeous human with whom Miss O’ has had the pleasure of sharing a stage, shared this theater story on Facebook. I asked Christy if I might use her post in full as part of today's blog, and she was delighted (and we hope she continues to feel that way once it's published). Here it is.

I had the great misfortune of sitting next to two clueless tourists at tonight's performance of “The Nance”, Nathan Lane's new Broadway play about a gay man in a burlesque show in 1937 when homosexuality was illegal. I knew I was in trouble when, during the first scene, they kept whispering back and forth, "I think he's gay. I think that guy is too." I say "whisper" generously. It was like a comedically exaggerated stage aside. In the second scene, the beautiful young man Nathan Lane is courting gets out of the bath tub and shows his completely naked body. They "whisper," "Oh, I like this play" and giggle. A few minutes later, the beautiful man kisses Nathan Lane. "Oh, I don't like this play." No giggling anymore. They literally said that. The woman then sighed loudly and said, "Oh Jesus Christ" anytime there was too "real" a moment or gay a scene. Then she graduated to snapping her program in frustration. I leaned over to Eli and said, "I'm going to cut a bitch." He said, "After the show, honey." During one riotously funny moment, I guffawed loudly and she looked at me and giggled. I said to her, "Wow, even YOU liked that line!" She looked confused. After the show, I asked her, "If you hated the show so much, why didn't you just leave?" She said, "I tried" and stormed away.

Dear homophobes,

Next time you go to TKTS, find out about the play you're going to see. Chances are, most options will be too gay for you. Might I suggest "The Perfect Crime”? And stay the fuck away from Broadway.

In her comments, Christy added this P.S.

My favorite part happened after the culprits left. The whole row of gays in front of us turned around and we all had a gab session about how badly we all wanted to cut her. And yet- none of us said anything during the show out of respect for the actors. But it's the gay men who behave disgustingly according to this dolt.

Christy’s Friend Tom commented: There is waaaay too much of this in NY theaters. Literally talking out loud about the play going on 20 ft in front of them. Well done for saying something. Hey boonie-dwellers - if you can't cope with plays that might challenge you a little bit, then go see Spider-Man. That's why it's there. New decree: From this day forth, any of us who witness this kind of bullshit during a play/movie/whatever have a social responsibility to swiftly tell the guilty parties to shut the fuck up. We'll call it Christy's Law.

Oh, Christy and Tom, Mama hears you. Miss O’ has a story, too, this one about the asshole family sitting behind her during the delightful musical, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, who as tourists were doubtless lured by Broadway’s newest low-brow bait, the Concession Stand, and said folks chatted as they opened wrappers and passed a drink, conversing in regular voices as if they were in their own living room watching a video. No amount of turning around to glare at them, no gesture of “Shhh” would shush them. They’d paid good money, one could imagine them thinking, and they would have their own experience. Oh, And fuck you. Because Miss O’ and all the rest of the audience got in for free? And the actors are holograms? Fuck YOU.

It's not new behavior, but it's no less baffling and maddening for that. During the last few years of a 15-year teaching career that began in 1987, I noticed that in the paper programs handed out at the band, orchestra, and choir concerts, the Music Department used the back to write a list of etiquette rules for concert attendance. The poor kids couldn't hear themselves perform. It was around that same time that I had a superb actor, Irwin Appel, visit my classroom for two days to teach my English and drama students about acting Shakespeare. He began by performing a monologue—Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and when he concluded, and in each of my five classes of diverse kids, he would smile and begin pointing as he spoke (with humor and kindness, but directly), “You got into your backpack just as I entered. You took out gum. You whispered to that guy, and he whispered back. You cleared your throat,” etc. He paused, surveying the room. “This is LIVE, folks. It’s live. I’m a living person, performing in a live space.” (You are not in your living room. This is not a video.) And my kids were genuinely astonished to be called out, amazed they’d been seen, even as Irwin was in the act of playing a character, and brilliantly, too. 

When did we think we wouldn't be noticed? With the advent of cell phones, too many ring tones began going off right and left and balcony throughout live performances, driving actors to distraction, and in NYC it's now a $50 fine. During one performance at, I think, The Studio Theater in D.C., an audience member in the front row took the call, and began talking in full voice. The actors stopped, and looked at her. The woman said firmly, “I have to take this, it’s business.” When an usher led her out to wild applause, the woman protested, genuinely stunned that she’d been ejected. The actors backed up to the beginning of the scene, and started again.

So why has this sort of rudeness become a new norm? Because I don’t think it’s only about a loud person at a theater performance, which is in itself be-yond. What I mean is this: Why can a tiny, tiny minority of people with money, or people who love guns, or people who fear science, DICTATE PUBLIC POLICY to an ENTIRE NATION? Because I have fucking had it with the ONE VOICE coalition. So WHY?

Easy answer: $$$$$ in the machines

Truer answer: Apathetic, distracted, self-involved citizens

I read that 65% of our nation’s citizens are online. Okay, Internet Citizens: When is the last time you read about public policy in depth? When is the last time you checked the voting record of your state  and congressional representatives? and wrote to praise or complain? When is the last time you signed a petition to your senators? When is the last time you wrote a letter to President Obama? (Miss O’ is, no doubt, on an FBI watch list by now.) When have you joined a march? Sent money for a major election? Let’s go smaller: When is the last time you attended a PTA meeting? a school board meeting? When is the last time you had a hard conversation about local, state, or national politics of any kind to the point of discomfort and rage? Miss O’ invites you to take stock. Are you as involved as you really could be? (When a fellow parent said to my brother (also a husband and father), “I don’t have time for all this voting stuff,” my brother replied, “That’s okay, buddy. I got your rights.”)

Benjamin Franklin sacrificed his entire (and potentially very comfy) old age to form a new Democratic Republic. What have you been up to? (Nearly all my “Pro-Life” friends on FB have been busy sharing “Pro-Gun” posters with compare and contrast “statistics” on them, while making fun of the folks like me who support the Newtown parents whose children were killed in a mass shooting. They are very noisy about it, these "life-loving" assholes. They all identify as “Christian.” Whom Would Jesus Shoot? Discuss.)

Use Your Inside Voice

I’ll take my voice down a tone. Let’s go to work: When I think about how much work it is to make one good lesson for an English class (several hours of reading, planning, typing, photocopying, checking out books, preparing a PowerPoint, creating transitions to the next lessons), or to create a terrific theater experience with my drama club of yore (weeks of reading scripts to choose the right one for the group; hours booking the rehearsal spaces, making audition materials, holding auditions, casting, designing sets and costumes; ten weeks of rehearsals and building; Saturdays spent at fleas markets; program creation, publicity, technical rehearsals; make-up application (foundation! all that Knox gelatin! nose shadows!); cue-calling in performance; talking to all the parents; set strike and theater clean-up), or to, say, create a new government in 1776 (read your history, for the love of god)—and how very quickly ONE PERSON’S ACTION can utterly destroy, or threaten to destroy, all that work: one kid refusing to shut up in class; one audience member refusing to shut up during a performance; one member of the Continental Congress refusing to vote on independence—I have to step back and stand in frank AWE of the power of one person’s voice.

One voice has tremendous power, but how do we choose to use that voice? That is the point.

Every time there is a mass shooting in the United States, I read recently, and with each higher death toll, gun sales reach new all-time highs. On the whole, the gun manufacturers of this country are overjoyed by these killings, and the killings of the children at Newtown most of all: record profits! It’s been a heady time. These manufacturers funnel huge money to an organization called the NRA, whose spokesman, Wayne “Certifiable” LaPierre, has called for a gun in the hand of every teacher, and more than that, in the hand of every man, woman, and child, in America.

So take a moment to think about my long, hard lesson plan up there, and about the one student who would not shut the fuck up long enough for me to enact it for the benefit of my class of 30 students. Now think of me WITH A GUN. Exactly how long do you honestly think any teacher in that situation would last in a classroom before she USED IT?

One voice should not have that much power. One person’s voice is so small, so...well, nothing. Right? "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Right?

Just like when your boyfriend says, “God, you’re not going to eat another piece of cake, are you?” Or your mom says, “Honey, you look like a tramp in that skirt.” Or your best friend says, “You know, maybe red isn’t your best color. Try black, and people won’t notice, you know, your hips so much.” And inside the heart of any woman who hears even one of these remarks from even one of these people, something happens that will scar for life, almost, because what occurs is, as Stephen Sondheim wrote, “a little death.” Every day, a little death: from one voice. Negative voices win. The negative always wins. Just ask Lucifer.

But. But. But. For anything positive to occur on this Earth, all it takes is one voice, too: YOUR SINGLE GODDAMNED VOICE.

Where is YOUR VOICE? How are you using YOUR ONE VOICE?

What, if anything—and there must be SOMETHING—what fucking MEANS something to YOU? What drives you, energizes you, blows your fucking head off of your goddamned shoulders and into another galaxy?

Sure, I have questions about our sometimes stultifying fear of spontaneous responses in live circumstances, the sometimes strangling restrictions of the concert hall and theater, the inhibiting parts of being in a space with loads of other people and having to, you know, behave ourselves. That said, as adult citizens, we have to know when to use our voices for the RIGHT REASONS—speaking up for injustice, or laughing at the genuinely funny, rather than talking out inappropriately just because we are thoughtless assholes.

My Theme Song: A Moment for Stream of Consciousness

My two great drivers: education and theater—how they inform each other, talk to each other—I keep thinking how my transcendent experiences have always involved storytelling—the NPR story I heard about a recent find of dinosaur bones, being reminded that dinosaurs have been extinct for around 65 million years, and for one second, the tiniest, I felt the distance of that, and I reeled, I wanted to dance; or when my 7^th grade language arts/social studies teacher, Miss Covington, asked us, “What is beyond the universe?” and we said, “Nothing,” and she said, “Well, nothing is something,” and my head exploded. Thrilling. Or reading Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” one summer in preparing my first Humanities class, and being blown away by its conclusion, which only means something because you’ve read the whole thing, so read it; or the moment when I read Stephen Hawking’s explanation of the Theory of Relativity and I GOT IT, and then, as quickly as revelation came, it vanished. I need stories, I need history, science, language, music, art—I need possibility and kindness and love. And now, yes, bourbon. We tell ourselves, each other, the story of the human condition. If we are sentient and sane, we want to improve the human condition, peacefully, joyfully. I mean, we want to set an example for the children. Right?

"One child is holding something that's been banned in America to protect them.
Guess which one."

Because “Little Red-Riding Hood” is so fucking scary. As my Grandma Kirlin would say, "And Jesus wept."

Today on Facebook, MORE Ignorance in Abundance!

FB FRIEND’S POST: The summer droughts were not caused by global warming, after all scientists say. [link to Yahoo article] See? The jury is out!

           

MISS O', in comment:   The earth is still losing summer Arctic sea ice at record levels (the ice that used to help deflect light and heat away from the Northern Hemisphere in summer); Australia has had all-time highs during its summer, forcing meteorologists to add a new color (purple) the map temperature ranges; the CO2 levels in the atmosphere stand at 390 parts per million when a clement Earth can only sustain life over time comfortably at 350 parts per million. The earth is still heating up, the Northern Hemisphere worst of all, and we need to end the use of fossil fuels if we are to do our part to reverse course. We just do.


           

FB FRIEND’S SISTER, in comment: And they say scientist are smart compared to those of us who believe in creation?

Query: Um, so if scientists would seem to support your politics on the environment, the science is okay? And because just one catastrophe cannot be linked to global warming, there is no global warming? (I can’t even address his sister’s comment. It just hurts too much.)

Goddamned IDIOTS. I wouldn't care except they fucking VOTE. (Somewhere I hear the poet Byron speaking through one of his narrators, remarking on the engraved words below my dusty, trunkless legs of sand a few years hence: “My name is Miss O’! Look upon my judgments, o, ye Mighty, and despair!” It’s why I drink.)

The Past as Prologue

Fairy tales. Rudeness. Apathy. Arrogance. Distraction. So many ills. I run up and down the stories of my life in my mind: I’m looking for the inspiration to do a thing that will matter. Something of use. Expressive. Outer directed. Performed in front of a rude, ignorant, live audience. Even my horoscope from Freewill Astrology agrees I have to get back to the garden of my inspiration.

And so it was that last week, while riding the subway to yet another day of work, I decided to start my own theater company. Now the last thing New York City needs is another theater company, but all of them are, essentially, closed doors, and I’m getting not in them. It’s tentatively titled, this company of mine, SOTS: Sick of This Shit, dedicated to Demolition of the Stupid. I’m meeting with my friends Ryan, Greg, and David on Tuesday evening to see what future there might be for such a company. I’ll let you know: As David remarked, "Well, you will never run out of material."

I say all this—write plays, share progressive items on Facebook, write this goddamned blog, and milk the shit out of it—knowing full well that what theater director Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003, of The Open Theater) said of his own explorations in the arts, is the true thing. He said in effect, “Change will not happen en masse, but one by one by one by one.”

One voice: Use your one voice to effect positive, good things.

Use your one voice.

One voice.

And, over time, it will become OUR VOICE. And I hope it's on pitch.

I leave you today with links to experiences and talks that show you just how powerful and expressive and vital one single voice can be on issues of real importance. If you want to have real impact, to make these kinds of changes happen, first you have to listen. Then you have to learn. Then you have to talk about it. Use your voice.

1. A TED Talk by Lawrence Lessig on Citizenry and how to reclaim it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html

2. I fucking love science on Facebook: “Like” her page, change your newsfeed, change your life.

3. Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in rare footage, posted today on Facebook by a professor of mine. And it is what you see in this film that gives me hope for all of humanity, for all of Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Gv1uLfF35Uw

Much love as always, even to the idiots,

Miss O’

Matters of Art and Death

At the Feet of the Master

“Things don't affect people the way they used to. I mean it may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something.”

“We're bored. We're all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now, may very well be a self perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?”

—André Gregory to Wallace Shawn, 

           My Dinner with André, 1981

Today your Miss O’ is thinking about meaning. This single week made fast work of sudden losses, health scares, deaths, and many other shocks, and at one point I remarked to my friend and colleague Howard, “I’ve started seriously thinking about what it all means.” Howard chuckled and said, “Who cares what it means?” And for some reason or another, possibly because I am less evolved than I should be, I care. My playwright friend Lynda remarked on Facebook, "I miss buying a new album and all of us sitting and listening to it, the way we used to listen to records." The shared experience of art means something, I think, and the farther we move away from it, the more remote we become to ourselves. (How's this for light reading on a Sunday in April?)

I was telling Howard about a new documentary showing at Film Forum here in New York City, André Gregory: Before and After Dinner, by his wife, filmmaker Cindy Kleine, and wondered if he had any interest in seeing it (Howard and I are Film Forum buddies who share a passion for classic movies, though he is far better versed in them than I am). As he had not seen My Dinner with André (the film to which this new one alludes), and especially as he had no particular interest in parsing meaning from art and existence in general (and doubtless he is healthier for it), I realized I’d just need to go by myself.

For those of you who are not acquainted with it, the movie My Dinner with André came out in 1981 and became what they call a “cult classic”. Directed by Louis Malle, the movie took place almost entirely in a restaurant over the course of a single meal between actor and writer Wallace Shawn, and experimental-theater director and actor André Gregory. (Gregory's production of Alice in Wonderland in 1970 is the stuff of theater legend.) The two men first became friends in 1973, and they are still collaborators and friends as of the date of this blog; the film was a scripted work based on their real lives in theater, and in it they play characters named “Wally” and “André”. (Shawn has said the "character" of Wally is a man motivated only by fear, and he wrote this movie in part to try to get rid of "that guy." That insight gives the film yet another great layer.) My first encounter with the movie was on video—I’d rented it with my friend Richard—who is now a Broadway stage manager, the one with the twins, for those of you keeping up with the cast of characters in my life—while in college.

I am often teased by some friends for my lifelong habit of using names when I tell a story. You’ll never hear me say, for example, “I had dinner with a friend.” Not only will I tell you the name of the friend and fill in useful biographical data, I will usually also tell you how I met that person. The title of the film, you see, resonated with me immediately: My Dinner with André. I loved the sense of invitation and inclusion in it, as if to say, “You remember André…,” and now as you watch the film you are part of the story, as you must already be friends with Wally. Coincidentally, I read just the other night something that the poet W.H. Auden said about names, from the essay “Auden and God” by Edward Mendelson (posted on Facebook by my friend Andy Becker):

"Auden’s passion for proper names in his poetry had a moral and theological point: like prayer, it was a form of attention. A proper name was a sign of personal uniqueness, and Auden used the word “miracle” to refer to anyone’s sense of the unique value of their own unpredictable individuality. ‘To give someone or something a Proper Name,’ he wrote, ‘is to acknowledge it as having a real and valuable existence, independent of its use to oneself, in other words, to acknowledge it as a neighbor.’ The value that is acknowledged through a proper name is not measurable in any objective sense; it exists in the eyes of the beholder."

Names for me are touchstones: When I say a name to you, as I doubtless will within seconds of an encounter, I am with you and also with that person, and we are all together. Being with people is vital to me, because I spend nearly all of my time alone (the lot of the writer)—and the need to be with people, as well as to be alone, was also one of the draws of moving to New York City after 20 years of my adult life in the country. So in the naming of names, I create a society, and having dinner with André, then, felt like the most natural thing in the world. (The philosopher Suzanne K. Langer said, “The very notion of giving something a name was the vastest generative idea ever conceived,” and when you think of all the things a name begins to conjure in your own mind, you’ll see how right she is: Miss O's friend is a just a friend, until he’s Richard.) Curiously, I almost never greet a friend by name; I’ve long been a person attached to sweetie, dear heart, doll, ass wipe. But once we part, you and your full name become a story for the ages, or at least for my office mates.

But back to André and that dinner with Wally Shawn.

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, My Dinner with André, 1981

The year is, let’s say, 1985, and Richard and I fell in love with this movie when we rented it a few years after it came out. We were seniors (or nearly, I'm not sure of the season) in Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech, and at the stage in our development where we were not only doing theater and ambitious to do more of it, but also asking why we were doing it. (It’s hard for me to imagine not getting to that place, as I seem to go there for regular and unplanned vacations, but plenty do not.) So as a gesture mimicking a Rooney-Garland barn experience, Richard and I rented the film again and had a showing in a studio in the Performing Arts Building for all the younger theatre majors, complete with bread sticks (because it's a dinner story, after all, and easy to get hungry). The result? Dead silence. Postures of annoyance. Then the words: "This is pointless," they said. "Self-indulgent," they said. "Nothing means anything," they summed up. Everyone seemed to feel his or her time had been wasted, when what Richard and I were hoping for was a rousing discussion about theater, the future of art, our roles in it. So out of the studio the undergraduates went, the breadsticks mostly untouched, off to memorize lines for scene study, to get head shots made, to prepare an audition. Richard and I could only conclude that our purpose for doing theater had changed over the years, while theirs was as yet still motivated by dreams of commercial success. Or something. Who cares what it means? has echoed in my head ever since but doesn't seem to land. "All life is an experiment,"Emerson said. "The more experiments you make, the better." Not every experiment is a success, of course, but considering my list of outright failures, it's astonishing I didn't take up drinking until I was 40.

When that movie was made, André Gregory had been a force in the so-called “experimental-theater” movement since the 1960s, studying with Jerzy Grotowski, a Polish theater director and founder of The Poor Theater, and going on to create his own company. Grotowski and Gregory were contemporaries, born one year apart (Grotowski in Poland in 1933, the same year as my dad, Bernie; and Gregory, the child of Russian Jews, in Paris in 1934, the same year as my mom, Lynne—I mention my parents because I cannot imagine more different lives than those of my folks and these two guys, who seem to live in mythological time), but Grotowski was the master at whose feet every artist who cared about theater’s future went to sit. Astonishing rethinking came out of that era of experimentation, so I'm thinking about that rethinking today, and thinking, "What now, my love?"

“I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” 
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I take issue with the term “experimental-theater” only because it seems such a shame to me that theater cannot simply be theater in whatever iteration; but in the commercial world, when it’s not a Disney-style musical the whole family will enjoy (!), or a contemporary realistic play, or a revival of a classic, one must “prepare” an audience with the caveat, “experimental,” which is to say, “weird/you might not like it/it’s not worth spending as much money on/not a sure thing,” etc. (I get it: Leisure time is golden, money is dear, choices must be made; and I think, Isn’t that a shame?) I love musicals, not ashamed to say it, and loved the commercials for touring shows I'd see on TV. Really, I knew only about commercial theater—though I did not see a live show until I was 15, the first show I saw that I wasn’t in being the Dalewood Community Theater production of L’il Abner (after which show I deeply offended the lead male when I thought my friend Denise knew him from church, hers being Our Lady of Angels, and he flashed, “I’m a proud Southern Baptist,” and it just goes to show politics and religion are the inescapable realities of human life until we all decide to grow the fuck up); thence followed a few high school field trips to see A Chorus Line (by which I was bored—no idea what in the hell was going on);  and Evita (thrilling!); and Mark Twain Tonight! with Hal Holbrook (really interesting).

My first encounter with the brand of theater (and may I pause to say ick? What a concept—what could feel more ick, really, than to become a "brand," and bless Stephen Colbert for his willingness to become one just to show us how vulgar, limiting, and creepy it is, his genius being to manage to transcend branding at the same time he makes a living from it) called “experimental-theater” occurred when I was a sophomore in college, serving as an assistant stage manager for a play called “Interview,” one of eight plays in a work called America Hurrah by Jean-Claude van Itallie, originally directed by Joseph Chaikin and developed with The Open Theater. America Hurrah premiered in New York (a faraway land hardly real to me then) in 1966, and my encounter with it would have been 1983, so the real question was, “Why was this two-decades-old play still considered avant-garde?” The term “avant-garde,” or in advance of one’s time, was also becoming creaky, and Chaikin’s work (admired by Gregory though they were not collaborators, which I learned in a film talk-back with the man himself just last week) was a revelation to me, and also a natural fit for my sensibilities. The director of this particular production was a graduate student, David Thomas, who went on to co-found ART Station in Stone Mountain, Georgia, which he still runs today (with his husband, Michael Hidalgo, who went to a rival high school of mine and whom David met at Tech—are you following?). Watching David work on this piece was fascinating, because he was taking what had been truly experimental at the time, and now directing it as a revival—which is to say a museum piece. His awareness of this irony was seminal in my education: He talked to the assembled eight actors (I’d failed the audition, but he’d seen something in me that he wanted me to stick around to assist) about the history of The Open Theater and their approach to developing a piece together: An empty space, total experimentation, exercises for building unity of the ensemble, saying “Yes” to new ideas, playing with things, seeing where it goes. That David was doing this as a graduate student project was the sticking point: He has no choice, really, but to treat Chaikin’s work as a textbook case, and reinvent it rather than create something totally new, given that the script was a finished piece, not a work in progress. There is nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes: It was a way of “sitting at the feet of the master,” as best he could at the time.

And it was during those rehearsals where I started to wonder, “Is there any experimental theater happening any more?” Too many plays we were reading for scene study, by then-contemporary writers such as Michael Weller and Kevin Wade, felt so small—stories of troubled relationships, or a bad marriage—so ordinary. Until college, to be fair, my entire theater experience amounted to being in the chorus of a handful of musicals, one Neil Simon play, one Kaufman and Hart play (“Who did you play in You Can’t Take It With You?” director and playwright David Hilder asked me early in our New York acquaintance. "How did you know I was in it?" I asked. "We were ALL in it," he said. Insert smiley face. I played Penelope Sycamore), and a few others, including forgettable competition one-acts and a children's show. That there was MORE, or that theater could be so ugly, imaginative, political, and unnerving, was a joyous discovery, because I was quite frankly bored with both realism and the stock musical comedy: I had decided to eschew acting for directing before I ever started college, mostly because I never wanted to act in anything like these plays again.  I don’t think I understood this at the time—what I mean is I could not articulate why I was disenchanted—and it wasn’t until learning about Chaikin that I awakened and I could say, “Now I know why I’ve been unhappy with acting.” At the time, I hated reading plays, and really I still do. I can count on one hand relatively modern plays that have sent me soaring and made me want to act in or direct them: America Hurrah by Jean-Claude van Itallie (by which I mean not that play, but rather it made me want to create original plays on meaningful themes with my students-to-be); Angels in America, Parts One and Two, by Tony Kushner; Fen by Caryl Churchill; The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder; and Talley’s Folly by Lanford Wilson. (There are others, I'm sure, but these come readily to mind.) These are wildly different scripts—but they have in common something so hard to explain: They are true. One feels it in one’s heart: “This is a true story of being human on Earth.” More than that: These plays have a social conscience and take on real issues, from AIDS, to worker and environmental exploitation, to corporate oligarchies and consumerism, to religious philosophy, to the discovery of love between two lost and unusual people. The language in each play is compelling. One cannot help but want to enter these worlds, and what we find there may or may not reflect us or console us, but it will surely awaken something in us.

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle."
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Bored yet?

If you have found yourself drifting as you read today’s blog, it may surely be because my writing is dull, but what’s even more likely is that this sort of reflection bores the shit out of you. If this is the case, do by all means stop reading and go for a walk, and do NOT rent My Dinner With André, which has been described by at least two geniuses I know (neither of whom much likes theater, as it happens) as “self-indulgent” and “deadly.” You have been warned.

What Richard and I responded to in the Malle film was the search for meaning that Gregory was immersed in: After many years as a commercial (if unconventional) actor (you've seem him: the guy who gets his eye gouged out by Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man, John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ) and revolutionary theater director, he just lost heart. He didn’t know why he was even doing it anymore. He walked away for about six years and went on a quest—a quest that most people could not afford, by the way, but that he could and did. Now that I am 48—the age Gregory was when he made the film—I relate whole-heartedly to his mid-life crisis, but when I was 21, I related to his existential crisis, I guess you’d call it: What does it all mean? For myself, I really wondered what it meant to do theater at all, for whom, and what did they, what does the world, get out of it? And if I become a teacher, what on earth do I have to teach anyone? And for what purpose?

More Art, Less Matter

From the time I was a little kid, I worried about where the garbage went, about disabled children feeling excluded, about how much things would cost when I grew up, about people dying or not being cared for. On my first field trip on a school bus to D.C. when I was in second grade, I couldn't take my eyes off the smoke stacks of plants, those clouds coming out of them, the eerie feeling it gave me of its unnaturalness. I was a barrel of goddamned laughs. In high school and college and in my early years of teaching, I used to spend long, long hours writing about meaning, trying to make meaning out of the events of my life and of the world. Mercifully I left my twenties, but not before a complete breakdown at age 28. And then, at the point when I wanted to give up entirely, I started again. It was at this time—in the midst of beginning therapy and moving to a new school and a new house—that I began creating truly original theater with my students, guiding them to write their own work out of their life experiences, which I then shaped into a drama for performance. Mostly I followed what I’d seen David do with his Chaikin work, and yet each process was different because the kids in each cast were always different, and the real fun of being a high school theater director was having a company of actors who came in, grew over four years, flew out, and were forever supplanted by new actors. It’s really nourishing, artistically. The down side is that while you have these kids, you always have to hurry up and put on the show, so the process is truncated in a way we all would sort of resent; then again, at least we finished something we could all be proud of, and audiences saw it and responded in largely positive ways.

André Gregory was not afraid to spend years making a play. His 1970 breakthrough work, Alice and Wonderland (which coincidentally I performed in at the Virginia Tech Summer Arts Festival in 1987), was created over the course of four years with a small company of dedicated actors—the Lewis Carroll work reimagined for adults. What I learned from doing this kind of work myself, as much as I was able, was that art and life can be one thing, and this way of working affirmed for me that the process rather than the outcome is where the joy lies. I have always enjoyed the rehearsals of a show more than the performances, and I must add that I am just as happy to have performed something so I can strike the set and move to the next thing. The performance part is for other people, and it’s the least you can do: Given all the work you’ve put in, why not? (Gregory and company have spent 14 years, off and on, rehearsing Wallace Shawn's adaptation of Ibsen's The Master Builder, and this process, and the resulting handful of performances (discussed in the new documentary), is the subject of a new movie by Jonathan Demme, Wally and André Shoot Ibsen, coming out this year.) And then there’s the question of meaning: If you make a play and no one sees it, does it count? If you create a work and only 22 of your closest friends witness the performance, does it have value on Earth?

“Good theater can happen anywhere,” a professor, Michael Cadden of Princeton, declared to a group of us drama directors at an NEH summer intensive in Vermont. “It can happen in your classroom. Just because only 20 of you saw it doesn’t make it any less valuable.”

Here’s another way to think of it: If you cook the most astonishing meal of your life—Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon, say, with noodles and French bread and garden fresh peas—and only your friends Chuck and David eat it, is the meal any less of a masterpiece?

And yet we live in the age of Hell’s Kitchen and the Iron Chef, of folk legend Leonard fucking Cohen playing to arenas of iPhones; of celebrities (who are nonentities) like Kim Kardashian making money hand over fist for posing in front of plastic sheets of corporate logos at movie premieres for thousands of photographers. Do you hear the clicks, the clatters, the echoes in this empty canyon?

Five chemical companies, including Monsanto, Dow, and DuPont, own 75% of the worlds SEEDS. Even the growing of food has become a synthetic production of the largest possible measure, and food has never had less flavor.

I submit that all this largeness is not only needless and vulgar; I submit that it is foolish, meaningless, exhausting, and that as it is, more powerfully, taking us to greater and greater levels of stupid, it is therefore deadly. My current search for a way back to meaning really is a search for what is alive. 

What’s the Most Annoying Trend in News? You Won’t Believe It!

Can we say THE TEASER? I am so fucking sick of teasers: What Are the Most Annoying Things Girls Say?  or What Is the Worst Food You Can Eat? The Answer Might Surprise You! or Which Famous Singer Died Today? or Who Has Your Mom Been Fucking? The Answer Might Surprise You! Does anything surprise us anymore? I want life to follow a quest narrative, and while I don't expect or even want an easy-teasy surprise answer, I really do live for a surprising question.

In the preface to the screenplay for My Dinner with André, Gregory wrote this:

 “A few weeks ago I had dinner with Twyla Tharp in her kitchen, and we were talking about the problems of the artist, or for that matter the individual, maturing in our society. Why do we have so few mature artists? Trying to answer this question, we began to speculate that your early years, say your twenties, should be all about learning — learning how to do it, how to say it, learning to master the tools of your craft; having learned the techniques, then your next several years, say your thirties, should be all about telling the world with passion and conviction everything that you think you know about your life and your art. Meanwhile, though, if you have any sense, you’ll begin to realize that you just don’t know very much — you don’t know enough. And so the next many, many years, we agreed, should be all about questions, only questions, and that if you can totally give up your life and your work to questioning, then perhaps somewhere in your mid-fifties you may find some very small answers to share with others in your work. The problem is that our society (including the community of artists) doesn’t have much patience with questions and questioning. We want answers, and we want them fast. My Dinner with André uses some of the experiences of my six years out of the theater as foundation stones for a work which is made up entirely of questions and which I would like to dedicate to all, artists and otherwise, who are out on the road somewhere wandering, with no destination anywhere in sight, almost forgetting why they ever set out in the first place, yet still unable to turn back, because they honestly believe that the shortest distance between two points just may not be a straight line.”

Miss O’ turns 49 in May. Reading Gregory's and Tharp's ideas struck a chord, you might say; this song of aging as an artist makes total sense to me. I have not had loud success, which is to say there has been no arrival, no fame, no (or little) money for my art. What our friend André is getting at is exactly what all human beings might need to be doing, especially in mid-life—it’s the opposite of settling in, shutting down, tuning out, waiting to die. Mid-life, in fact, is the most opportune time to question everything, to awaken and challenge all the old assumptions, because you have learned shit, you have experienced shit, and you still feel pretty good. (Stephen Hawking has lived far longer with ALS that most people can because, his late mother asserted, he’s a searcher.) You are no longer riding on received wisdom, but are rather becoming the potential dispenser of that wisdom.  The secret of a worthwhile life and worthwhile art, I think, is love (searching for it and giving it), followed by questing to understand more about who we all are, followed by making something out of the quest; “to hold, as ‘twere, a mirror up to nature,” as Hamlet said, to show human beings the body of their time, and then to strike it down and start again. And then, of course, to enjoy a fine malt beverage at each day’s end, with friends. I realize, as I say, as I have voiced these ideas over the years, that not everyone agrees with any of them, or with all of them, or with all of them at once. And I think that's why we seek not only our friends, but also art. In art we can feel less alone in our private insanity. Music, poetry, theater, sculpture: there's art for everyone, and an artist to speak to each of us. I never thought I'd care about painting, for example, hard though I tried, and then it happened. If you haven't found your visual artist yet—my first was Georgia O'Keeffe, "Blue Lines," at the National Gallery when I was 21; followed shortly by Van Gogh's portraits of inmates in an asylum, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and now the list includes too many to name, but the last artist whose work caused me to sob while standing in front of it was Romare Bearden, a retrospective of his collages at MoMA, in 2006—it's never too late. You cannot plan the epiphany, is what I mean, but nor will you have a chance to experience it unless you get out there into worlds of art beyond what you currently know. 

Death in Chelsea 

All the things I'm musing on have to do with human endeavors rather than connections to the natural world, but I'm concerned today with what human beings are making out of their lives when they aren't trying to kill each other or screw each other over. In New York Magazine this week is an essay, or rather, an elegy, “The Death of the Gallery Show” by Jerry Saltz, which offers as its subhead, “Between online sales and art fairs, fewer and fewer people are showing up to see art in its natural habitat.” The author laments the closing of a lot of galleries, owners thrown out by jacked-up rents ($30,000 per MONTH?) or bankrupted by lack of attendance. “The art world has become more of a virtual reality than an actual one…,” Saltz writes. He is discussing the meaning of art shows, and he echoes Gregory, but for the audience rather than the artist:

Looking, making, thinking, experiencing are our starting point. Art opens worlds, lets us see invisible things, creates new models for thinking, engages in cryptic rituals in public, invents cosmologies, explores consciousness, makes mental maps and taxonomies others can see, and isn’t only something to look at but is something that does things and sometimes makes the mysterious magic of the world palpable. (p. 102)

Saltz concludes:

Proust wrote, ‘Narrating events is like introducing people to opera via libretto only.’ Instead, he said one should ‘endeavor to distinguish between the differing music of each successive day.’ That’s what we do when we look at art, wherever we look at it, however much noise surrounds it. In galleries, we try to discern ‘differing music,’ and it’s still there right now. I love and long for it. (p. 102)

I am always searching for great theater, and whereas most art galleries are free (though their contents are far from it), one of my frustrations about theater is the cost, specifically high ticket prices which make theater more and more exclusive; available to, and therefore too often made only to serve and flatter, wealthy people. I’m sick of wealthy people. I’ve had it with luxury goods and celebrities and blockbusters and Iron EVERYTHING. I’m sick of what my mom, Lynne, calls the vapid. Is it just me? I really do think the free, palpable art experience is worth having, worth seeking out, and worth trying to make. It's why I live, and I guess, just like Jerry Saltz up there, and André and Wally. I guess we keep writing about it because we can't help thinking you should have these experiences, too, that somehow your lives will mean more if you do. And that art will make us kinder, better people. (I'm still working on it.)

"Do you think I've gone round the bend?"
"I'm afraid so. You're mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are."
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Here’s to André Gregory, Before and After Dinner, and all the art in between, coming soon to a theater probably nowhere near you—its commercial obscurity doesn’t make it lesser art, but rather makes it matter all the more.

And so, to drink.

Love from Miss O'

Miss O', Elizabeth Wills, and Richard Rauscher,
BA, Theatre Arts, Virginia Tech, Class of '86,
shortly before setting off to change the world.

She Oughta Be in Pictures

All (Mostly) About My Mother

Lynne Kirlin, high school graduation photo, Council Bluffs, Iowa, 1952

So my brother Pat was going home for Easter for the first time in a decade, this time with his wife, Traci, and 8-year-old son, Cullen. I’d planned to go home (funny how we talk about going “home,” which is where our childhoods were, our family hearts are, but it’s really so alien to me—everything that was gargantuan in my childhood, from the yard to the bookshelves to the couches, to my parents’ bodies, seems too small now, or else I’ve become outsized in my skin) in May, but now was just fine. I booked a bus, and on the ride to D.C. I realized that Cullen was the right age to show photographs to, to show him some of his ancestors.

My mom, Lynne, has always had a very strained and complicated relationship with photographs. Growing up, though, we had a 14” or so square wicker basket that contained all the childhood, youth, and pre-marriage photos she and my dad possessed. Tossed into it over the years were ones they took together, along with the holiday pictures sent to us by aunts and uncles—cousins’ school pictures or family snaps—as well as pictures taken by neighbors. The fun of this picture basket was that you could dip into it and pull up a random memory, which really is how our minds work, when it comes to that—a photo album is made to show the chronology of events, or maybe is based on a theme of our lives, but the basket has always felt more honest in relation to the way events will make us recall a family story. “Oh, that reminds me of the time my mom opened the door for Nadine’s piano teacher, and my dad was standing in the kitchen with his back to them, pouring water from a kettle into the coal stove, and the teacher only saw my dad’s hands in front of him and the water coming out in a stream, and she gasped….” (That’s a memory that really wouldn’t belong in anyone’s formal chronology of events, you know?)

In graduate school I read a book called Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko, a marvel of a book about the role of story in shaping a culture, in this case, the Navajo culture in the American Southwest. In the introduction she talks about the Hopi picture basket, a tradition that developed once Native Americans started accepting photographs as part of the way to tell the story of the People; and this decision, coupled with the decision to embrace writing and not only the oral tradition to continue the stories, was not made lightly, either. When I read about the Hopi picture basket, I remembered ours, of course, and wondered if it’s something lots of people started doing when they couldn’t afford the materials, time, or even the imaginative energy needed to make picture books.

In addition to the basket, my mom had a photo album of her life in the United States Navy from 1956 to 1963 or so (her marriage and pregnancy meant she’d be leaving by May of 1964), and it has always been one of my favorite things to look at. All my life, it rested atop a stack of art books on the right-hand side of the built-in bookshelves my parents had put in when they moved into their house 8 weeks after I was born. We were the only family I knew that had a “library”— and the “collection,” such as it is, consists even today mainly of my mom’s college textbooks (English Literature, American Literature, Plato, Spanish history, algebra, grammar), science texts (The Sea Around Us, The Microbe Hunters, archaeology, Egyptology), Agatha Christie mysteries, and great works of literature (Thackery, Austen, Thoreau, Twain, Melville, Cervantes, poetry anthologies, the Brothers Grimm, the Brontes). As I say, it looks so small now, this library, but its presence was one of those things that set the O’Haras apart from their neighbors, another way my mom was just not like the other mothers. It made us weird, and yet also inspired awe: "Your mom has read ALL of these?" (What choice did Miss O’ have then?)

So the album: What I’ve always loved about that large, square, tan-covered collection of navy-era pictures—placed on large black paper sheets using adhesive photo corners, black or white—was how it told the story of my mom before “us”: Scenes of my mom in the rain forest in Puerto Rico; at the Breakers in Newport; at attention in uniformed inspections on various bases, my mom’s tanned legs preventing a need for regulation hosiery (“My CO never noticed the difference”); her formal naval portraits in both white and black uniforms; and candid shots of lots and lots and lots of parties and all the fabulous dresses my slender and glamorous mother wore to them. My favorite of the dresses was a deep taupe, or dark brown-grey cotton dress with three-quarter sleeves, fitted bodice and flared skirt to the knees, with large white windowpane lines across the fabric, its only pattern. The dress went up to the neck, but was backless, which I know because of the photo of my mother in an embrace, the man’s arms around her bare back, lips in a passionate (and doubtless drunken) lock—really wild to see when you realize, “This is my mom,” and how they all were probably 24 but looked 35, which made that photo all the wilder.

Also there were snaps of navy people, including the last active-duty Commodore; my mom’s CO, Lt. Doug Kiker (who would become an NBC news anchor); Kate Barker, a fellow WAVE (they were still called that then) who used to visit when I was little—a large woman who looked like Kate Smith and drove a Cadillac convertible (which I asked for a ride in by promising her a ride in our Volkswagen—and what a ride!; and Laura Corr, another WAVE, who was from New Orleans and gave me a black Mammy doll when I was a baby (I still have her and treasure her), because Laura was reared by her own mammy (Laura was, as it turned out, the first true bigot my mom ever met, but otherwise a fun gal). My mom realized later that Kate and Laura, though never with each other, were lesbians—another interesting facet of life in the album.  In the back of this same album, after her naval career pictures, rested, loosely, various other photos, including some of her cousins’ weddings, my favorite being an 8” x 10” of her white-tuxedoed cousin Bob shyly posing with a silver ladle, serving punch into a silver cup to his shy new wife JoAnn, ca. 1960, and you know full well these two were complete innocents upon entering the marriage state; overseeing this scene was my gorgeous Grandma Kirlin, who wore plastic floral costume jewelry like a Hollywood star wears diamonds. I used to stare at that black and white picture for long minutes—my twice-divorced, struggling grandma (Bob’s beloved aunt by marriage), looking on with such love and hope at these two sweet newlyweds at their wedding reception; but this scene is made into a story by the way my grandma, in profile, is leaning hard on the table, the fingertips of her two hands pressed hard on the cloth, and one wrinkled, fleshly elbow exposed below a cream short sleeve of her black and white dress—a pose that says, however unintentionally, “Kids, good for you, but this isn’t going to be easy.”

So many pictures: I have looked at this album on nearly every visit since college, a flip-through of my mom’s story, and I understood more about her because of it. I needed the proof of this album. My mom is a very closed person, and one not given to sentiment, though she drops a story from time to time. I said earlier that my mom has a complicated relationship with photographs, and here is what I mean: Whenever I visited other people’s houses, I noticed that almost no one had books, but nearly everyone had framed photographs of family members hanging on the walls or resting at angles on ledges. When I asked my mom why we didn’t display photos, Lynne replied sharply, “Because it’s morbid." (She always used really cool words like that and didn't define them.) "Why do I want to look at dead people up on the walls? And it’s silly to put up pictures of living people—I see them all the time.” And that was that. When my friend Patty became a framer in 1988, I found all of the 8” x 10” photos we had, along with dozens of old family snapshots that looked special, and had Patty frame all of them. I gave them as presents to my family for years. The year I quit teaching the first time, in 1990, and worked for a farm paper, I absconded with the picture basket and made photo albums for all of us for Christmas, leaving quite a pile in the picture basket nonetheless, because I would miss dipping in if I hadn’t. To my surprise, my parents have hung all the pictures I’ve had framed for them, and they keep the albums out where everyone can see.

 

My grandma, Louise Kirlin, with daughter Lynne,
Iowa ca. 1935, hand-tinted photo

So when I got home on Friday afternoon, wanting to prepare for Cullen’s arrival on Saturday, I went upstairs to the bookcase to retrieve the navy album, but it had been moved. I called to my mom, who was coming up the stairs, “Mom, where is your navy photo album?”

Lynne said, “Oh, I threw it out.”

Threw it out?

My spine seized. I gasped. And I began to sob, the tears uncontrollable. “Oh my god. You didn’t….”

And Lynne surveyed me quizzically, as she does, and said flatly, as she does, “I didn’t have any attachment to those pictures. What do you care? Less junk to clean up when I’m gone.” My tendency to tears has always annoyed her—I am a sentimental O’Hara, one of my many deeply unattractive qualities, whereas Lynne, a survivor of astonishing inner strength, gets on with it. And in this event, I had no one to share my grief with: curiously, my father and brothers had never even looked at that photo album, had no idea what I was talking about when I’d mentioned she’d tossed it in the trash. (Another of my deeply unattractive qualities is snooping, looking at notebooks and inside albums and through boxes. I had another moment of panic but didn't ask if my mom had thrown out her college writing, which I'd loved to read. These things are my mother's after all, to do with as she wishes. I have no claim on them. (Note: Pat just told me he snooped and looked at that album, too.) 

 

As to the depth of my grief, the torrent of unexpected tears, what I understand now is that this is how I will feel—only more so, much more—when I learn, as I eventually will, that my mother has died.

Long Ride Home

At the Braddock Road stop on the Metro (as I headed to Union Station on Sunday afternoon, after a very pleasant holiday hiding Easter eggs and watching the joy with which my nephew hunted for them; a fine day also to throw the Frisbee and the football; and to share a neighborhood moment as we all walked down to the corner of Alaska Road where a car had somehow crashed through a fence on one side of the street and ended up crashed into a house on the other—Cullen even mimicked the way we all walked with our hands in our pockets to survey the scene, trying to solve the mystery amidst the flashing siren lights—no one was hurt), as the train doors opened, a woman of about 40, plain-faced, her mouse brown hair chopped sharply just beneath her ears, entered with a younger, bearded man in an army green canvas jacket. They sat across the aisle from me, and the woman, who was speaking in the clear voice of someone who more or less wants the car to overhear, shared her anger and confusion over having been made to reconcile all her early years of catechism with public school lessons in evolution (“and then later you realize Darwin’s not right, but it’s too late,” and Miss O’ managed not to interject, “Um… actually…”), and what a trauma that was for her and, in her view, is for all children to learn the truth about things like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, not to be told from the beginning that all of these things are symbols, and yet where is the wonder? “You can only find wonder with God, and we need to teach that…,” and the young man had his own anger over his upbringing, but he didn’t get many words in before they exited at Pentagon City.

I’d remembered to ask Pat and Traci, as we prepared to dye Easter eggs and when Cullen was outside, “Does Cullen still believe in the Easter Bunny?” and it turns out he does, and I told my mom, “Mom, Cullen still believes,” and my mom was delighted—we’d made his Easter basket already, and now she knew to have it set out before he got up in the morning. Lynne the Realist—the rigorous student who in her papers forever challenged the Jesuits of Creighton University on the doctrines of the Catholic Canon; the agnostic/atheist/do-your-own-religion woman who thinks sentiment is stupid—this same woman is yet deeply in love with Santa, ghosts, all things Halloween, and the Easter Bunny candy delivery system. And so I started thinking about how Santa Claus is different from catechism teachings, er, evolution, and I remembered Pat saying that when Cullen asks him (as he most likely will this Christmas) if Santa is real, “I’ll tell him Santa is here,” and he pointed to his heart, “and that’s as real as it gets.”

The science of Darwin is the outer-directed world of measurable facts. Where God dies as a concept for so many occurs at the point where God is treated like Darwin rather than like Santa. God is also Santa, and the Easter Bunny—the God of any religion has to live in a person’s heart, or not at all, is the point. I do hope that someday that very troubled woman on the Metro is able to find that truth inside herself—funny how a stranger’s torments can haunt me.

This got me thinking that my mom’s photo album—her life before us—was a tangible, measureable thing that is simply no more, just as she will be, just as my dad, Bernie, will be; as I will be. Here and gone: to be, and not to be. And so I am writing about it, how I will hold it in my heart, which is where it really lives anyway. The rest is so much paper.

It’s Up to You, New York

A 7-hour bus ride into Manhattan was made out of what should have been just over four-plus, through fog and traffic pile-ups (though the Lincoln Tunnel would be empty and the subways merciful), and during the last two hours a man behind me began a round of cell-phone calls which made those of us around him want to deck him, mostly because he seemed to want us all to hear them. One ongoing conversation was about editing a letter, “‘To that end,’” he insisted, “should be the wording,” at one point. He punctuated conversations with phrases like “it’s a new day,” and with addresses of “my Brother,” and eventually I think we all began to realize—though it took over an hour for me to realize it, and maybe I’m slow, though I was dozing as much as his voice allowed—that he was doing his round of Sunday night therapy calling, either as an AA sponsor or some kind of counselor, where he talked basketball and hope, urging each person on the line to get to the next day. The two and a half extra hours on the road may have been the reason for the “fuck it” attitude of his natural and too-audible voice, the reason for blithely irritating his fellow passengers while he went about his business of saving lives. Still, I could not completely be okay with it. If the man had preceded his calls by saying to the passengers around him, “Guys, I am a counselor and people depend on me to contact them,” would we have been more understanding? Or did we have to have the reasons for his calling slowly dawn on us to reach that place? I don’t know. I only know that I could not wait to be in Queens, in my own bed, and out of that dark night of other people’s souls.

The Thousand Natural Shocks That Flesh Is Heir To

When I got off the bus on 7^th Avenue, I was heavy with the need for sleep, as I say, and also deeply sad. It was partly about my mom’s discarding of an item of too much importance to me, but really there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on. I woke up feeling as if the world was different, this small shift, couldn’t quite figure it out. I began writing this, and something told me what it was, and I logged onto Facebook and there was a message from my dear friend George: “Do not go public with this yet, but my mom died in her sleep last night…” and there it was. George’s mom, Judy, was gone. She deserves a tribute I don’t know how to give here, and she will have a beauty of one from her loving son.* I met Judy a few years after I’d graduated from Bread Loaf (the graduate school where I’d met George), but my first encounter with her gifts (aside from her son, who became one of my best friends) was a Bread Loaf tee shirt George presented me with for my graduation, tie dyed by Judy herself. George imitated her, “I’m not sure what I want to do. Do I want to swirl or do a spiral?” and told me how she’d stared and thought it through before going with pink sunbursts. I know a hundred stories about Judy, just as George knows a hundred about Lynne. Our moms figure at the heart of our life stories. I’d like to think my mom will be around another decade, but one never knows. Judy was doing well up until she was about 80, five years ago, and then began what George called “the long fade.” Lynne is 79.

I have deeply wise friends who are biologists and poets, some of whom reflect on death and what that means, and some who don’t. All of them are engaged with life, though, and some step aside at moments and wonder what in the hell that means; and others are at one with living, present to it, and try to keep the ego out of it all, not worrying about the meaning at all. For myself, I’m in it up to the neck and into my head, down the spine and through the heart, ego and all, death and life, and can’t seem to be otherwise. What I mean is, as far as I am concerned we are all in this picture, until we are not, and I mean to keep the album and look hard at each and every person in the photograph for as long as I can. And mean it.

Miss O' with her mom, Lynne, in Virginia, 1964

(P.S. The long fade: I made another discovery that I really can’t bear to write about. That old picture basket? I couldn’t find it. I guess Lynne threw that out, too. I was too choked to ask.)

(*And she does: Tribute posted on Facebook. Love to George, Apryl, and Sam, in memory of that angel of a human, Juliana Lightcap, 1928-2013.)